Off-Panel: Authentic Blackness, #VisibleWomen, and John Lewis

Welcome to Off-Panel, your weekly digest of comics news, from the gutters and beyond.

This is one of the blackest things that Marvel Comics has ever put out into the world. It’s not just super-black because of the cast and the story it tells. It’s super-black because of how it uses blackness to tell its story, peeling back layers of erased and redacted history to generate a fuller portrait of black humanity in the Marvel Universe.

“Where I had once been able to turn out three or four comics per month in addition to whatever else I was writing, now I struggled to write even one comic per month, and sometimes failed to get even that much done,” Straczynski wrote. “Some who followed my work assumed that the slowdown was due to a sloppy work ethic, or getting bored and waddling off. But the truth was that I simply couldn’t see the computer screen.”

Book Three tells a story how people kept going, how people never gave up or gave in, in spite of the bombing of a church, the beating on the bridge as we had left church to march all the way from Selma to Montgomery.